Restorations
by Karanguni
Summary: And Shinra said, we are going to save the world, and then said, but let us start with restorations. Post AC. Slight Tseng/Rufus.
1. I

They sent him into Wutai because it was the predictable thing to do, and these days it paid to do things predictably.

When Rufus told them what he wanted of Tseng, Reno said, 'Once upon a time we'd just have caught them off their guard,' as he rocked back into an office chair they'd plundered from the remains of the tower. 'Slapped them in the face and got in and got out.'

'When I said restoration, Reno,' Rufus interjected, 'I didn't mean either restoration by force, or restoration of Shinra alone.'

'Really?' Reno asked, spinning to look their President de facto, but even de facto titles were important in the eye. His reply was too arch to be simple. Rufus managed a wry smile when Reno followed up saying, 'Sorry, boss. After years of being selfish bastards, it's hard to break out of the habit, yeah?'

So they sent him to Wutai in the oddest of roles: the herald with the olive-branch, the penitentiary, the gruesome apologetic who would walk into a nation he abandoned with the name of the world's most popular enemy written across his chest and, in all audacity, bow in the ways he'd forgotten in front of the elders he did not remember while offering them words they did not want before finally proffering monetary support and plans for infrastructure which they would no doubt throw back into his face.

Tseng told Rufus as much. 'You're sending me there on a suicide mission.'

'Are they going to stone you to death?' came the mild response. 'And even if they are, you're familiar with the procedure, aren't you? Men in glass houses, after all.'

'You haven't changed, _sir_,' Tseng said, and he meant that in the worst way possible.

Rufus was eager for reform; he thirsted for it now like he'd wanted very few things in his privileged, particular and perversely narrow lifestyle. The end of the world had made him into a reformist and a protector of cultural rights and a saint with a conscience, except that saints, Tseng was fair sure, did not have the methods Rufus Shinra had. What was the use of a conscience when one used it the way one once wielded _fear_? Tseng had spent too many years as a Turk thinking about apologetics.

Tseng doubted Rufus had ever, with all due respect, contemplated anything other than politics. He said, 'Shinra no longer owns the world.'

'And I wonder, Tseng,' Rufus replied. 'I wonder, did Shinra ever?' and Tseng had to give pause. Rufus Shinra could frustrate and could irritate with what seemed like short-sighted blindness and inadvertent arrogance, but as Rufus turned to face him, Tseng saw the man he'd chosen to follow a long time ago there 'No, you're not a philosopher. Go to Wutai. Give them what they don't want. They'll most likely loathe you for it. They'd rather spend a decade as an independent backwater developing at a crawl than spend a year of steady growth relying on blooded money. And if they do, we'll both be here watching them struggle every foot of the way. It's repentance either way, isn't it? The truth of a good game plan. Go to Wutai. Go back _home_. Make that your apology. It's harsh enough for even your own standards, I believe.'

'Rufus,' Tseng spoke. There'd been too much heat in those words. It was in Rufus' nature to do things past the point; he could do it with self-blame as easily as he could with his games of money and moving mountains.

'Pity is for those who have the time and luxury for it,' Rufus said. 'We gave up that time after the end of the world, remember?'

'You haven't changed, sir,' Tseng said again. 'At least, not in your penchant for dramatics.'

The flint in Rufus' eyes faded, partially, and for a moment he looked like what and who he was twenty-odd years old and world-weary. If Tseng stayed, they'd keep comparing scars, and then there'd be no end in sight. 'What are you offering them?' Tseng questioned, and it was like pushing a switch Rufus reached into his drawer and drew out a grid plan and a data module, and then it was _work_: foundations for an electrical circuitry system, boosters for PHS signals, soft and hard copy blueprints for solar and turbine power generators, invoices for a stock of chemical scrubbers to be used in equipment until the time that oil and carbon based fuels could be discontinued.

Rufus was smiling, at the end of the session. Tseng raised an eyebrow in askance. 'I wanted to change the world when I was a child, didn't I?' Rufus asked.

'Don't confuse yourself,' Tseng shook his head, standing and tucking the documents under his arm. 'When you were a child, you wanted to _rule_ the world. The two are different.'

'Go to Wutai,' Rufus sighed, dropping his head to his chest. 'Just go to Wutai.'

That said, they couldn't just call up and helicopter and fly themselves wherever they wanted; it wasn't so easy anymore. More than that - Rufus was used to seeing the big picture, used to operating within it, and all his instructions still sounded the same and had the same competency, but they'd relied on buildings worth of people that were no longer theirs now. If it had been Midgar and not Edge, there would have been hundreds of engineers, human resource people, technicians and publicists who could have, once upon a time, come up with a plan in twenty-four hours and have each individual, blindly developed piece delivered to Tseng with an eyes-only command attached.

Things were more transparent in the new age, or whatever it was the people chose to call it. Reeve didn't look pleased to see him when Tseng arrived at the World Restoration Organisation headquarters, but Reeve rarely look pleased at all these days, and Tseng could hardly blame him.

'And Shinra's mess comes knocking on my door again,' Reeve sighed when Tseng walked into his office. 'What absurd miracle does Rufus want now?'

_Absurd_ was a good description of their situation. The WRO and Shinra were opposites in the eyes of the public, and yet internally they ran parallel: Rufus wanted to "do good", and Reeve wanted to rebuild. Their aims were similar; their operating procedures vastly different. _'You have the money,_' Reeve had told Rufus in their initial meetings conducted at Haelin with only Elena and Tseng as witnesses. _'But I know men who would rather starve and die than work under the Shinra banner, and I wouldn't call them foolish for it.'_

And Reeve was right - there had been an enormous fallout after Midgar was abandoned. Shinra held all the assets and facilities and wages and jobs, but men were beginning to remember inconveniences such as integrity and honour. Without the behemoth city looming up and above and everywhere, and without the anonymous crowd, and without the noise of an eternal night-time padded by a green Mako glow, out in Edge city men turned into neighbours, co-workers and friends. The cranes and the buildings were coming up again, but now everything reached upwards from equal ground, and there were spaces in between plazas and alleys winding through corridors of shops and parks and a road that led back to the abandoned church. Edge was a different place. It had different people in it. These _citizens_ wanted no part in the conspiracy that had bled their planet dry and wrung them almost to extinction. Shinra was spat on. Salaried men and wage-earners alike left their jobs and took to the street.

Reeve had inherited the headaches of a teething city. Tseng didn't envy him any more than he envied Rufus. 'Every time you come into my office, Tseng, I get a headache,' the director of the WRO said, beckoning the Turk into one of the many chairs littered in front of his desk. 'If Rufus wants a vehicle, he sends Elena. If he wants blueprints and maps, he sends Rude. If he wants me to overrule a plan, he sends Reno. But every time he sends _you_, I end up having to give you an arm and a leg and half of my already much-shortened lifetime.'

'All hail Reeve Tuesti,' was Tseng's bemused reply. 'Saviour of the world not once, but twice.'

'I didn't _save_ the world with Cloud,' Reeve held up a hand. 'Don't get me wrong. It was a good job, but that was the beginning, not the end. And now Strife runs a delivery service sending packages back and forth from Kalm to old Midgar while Lockhart tends a _bar_ in the crumbling remains of a slum that has an entire dysfunctional city hanging above it just waiting for structural damage and rust to eat through its supports. You understand if I'm vexed.'

'I understand,' Tseng said, slipping into a chair. 'And you're still facing recruitment problems?'

'Some people don't trust in large organisations anymore,' Reeve said, wryly. 'They seem to forget that the only thing that kept them fed and clothed _was_ Shinra, and that if they don't want to go to Rufus, they'll have to come to me. Instead, we have a third of the population requesting licenses to set up their own shops and rent their own spaces. It's good spirit,' Reeve said, patting a large folder. 'But I can't help them like that.'

'Meanwhile, Rufus sells them tractors and large vehicles and cranes at prices which have him complaining ceaselessly,' Tseng nodded. 'And then they get the equipment and they savage off the red logo and work them until they break down, and look in askance when Rufus can't provide them enough. They think we're planning something. Conspiring again.'

'Did you come here to talk about Edge alone?' Reeve asked, narrowing his eyes at Tseng. 'Because if you want a list of complaints the city has, Tseng, I can give you one a mile long, and that's not a metaphor. Rufus knows what's wrong with Edge. Rufus thinks Edge is Midgar; he keeps better tabs on things than I do, sometimes. So that's not why you're here.'

'No,' Tseng admitted, pulling out his data module. 'It's Wutai.'

There was a pause.

'Hell just take Rufus now,' Reeve said simply. 'It'll save me the effort of throttling him myself.'

'We know the worst of the damage is here in Edge -'

'Which is _precisely_ why Rufus wants something from me to deal with an entire culture and country that's halfway across the planet? Tseng,' Reeve said, an element of threat in his voice. He welcomed Turks in past his doors, but reserved the right to ask them to leave.

'- but Wutai is a danger of a different sort,' Tseng finished his sentence. 'You're an engineer, Tuesti, not an environmentalist.'

'And Rufus _Shinra_ is?'

'He wasn't,' Tseng agreed. 'But he's had two years worth of calling in every tertiary-educated professional in the field, and he sits in his office reading through old lecture notes skimmed off of the university's servers, then old maps and the updated ones after. You have to remember who he _is_, Reeve. By the time Rufus was sixteen, his father had ensured he knew enough about materia and Mako to keep up with the developments in Hojo's laboratories. I'm rather sure Rufus would have ensured it himself even without his father's insistence. Do you really think that he'd sit idly just because he no longer has a Science department to find his answers for him?'

'So now he's a, what were the words that Shinra used to describe AVALANCHE in the past? A "hippy tree hugger"?'

'I've not seen Rufus hug a tree,' Tseng said. 'And he continues to dress sensibly.'

'God,' Reeve swore, very softly, before he cleared some space on his desk. 'Fine. Talk to me. What does he see?'

Tseng put down a map, and brought out a transparent overlay. He laid his data module beside it, and tapped on it. 'Wutai,' he said, keeping his voice flat and his eyes blank, 'sits in the Western continent, and spreads from this latitude,' he pointed with his stylus, 'through to here, and this longitude here. Within the boundary just outside of its capital,' Tseng highlighted a substantial area on the screen, 'sits some of the richest oil deposits on their continent. They investigated and drilled extraction points in three separate locations over fifty years ago, but within two decades Mako technology had been developed, and the consequent wars did not stop the spread of ported reserves into the towns even if it prevented a generator from being built over the Mako-rich mines in the north-westerly regions.'

Tseng overlaid the transparency on the map. 'There has been news that Wutai is choosing to drill again,' he said, quietly. 'Seven points excluding the re-opening of the initial three, which would give them enough crude oil to fuel the West for at least a hundred years, but produce enough run-off considering their outdated state of technology to poison the inner-land sea to the east and throw us back to Corel-type pollution. Wallace and Strife, with your permission, run an extraction near Kalm, but they accepted Shinra-based technology and limit their emissions and run-off. Wutai is -' Tseng paused, tapping his stylus on the map's edge, 'stubborn. Its people are,' he paused again, 'stubborn.'

'Stubborn,' Reeve said, unimpressed. Tseng was calling a Cretan a liar. He looked up at him, and wondered which half of the Turk he was looking at - the part that belonged, or the part that'd forgotten.

Tseng ignored him. 'There have been requests made,' he said, voice calm, 'for them to cease their expansionary activities, or to - at the very least - accept newer technology from us. In both cases, their answer has been a rather resounding _no_.'

'Have you given them these damage reports?' Reeve asked, motioning at the documents.

'Insofar as we could over the limited networking and communications we have with them, yes,' Tseng said. 'They haven't been amenable.'

'Out of sheer "stubbornness"?' Reeve questioned, sceptical. 'That doesn't sound --'

'Right?' Tseng finished for the director. 'No, it's their nobler reason that keeps them at arm's length.'

'What did they say?' Reeve asked.

It was a smile tight and thin that found itself scarring Tseng's face. 'They said, _oil is going to be the restoration of Wutai's honour._'


	2. Interlude I

A/N: An interlude, for Rufus.

* * *

Even in the aftermath of everything, few men would tell Rufus Shinra what to do with his life.

_Everything_ was a subset of the world Rufus had grown up to inherit: _everything_ included in its definition the sun-baked streets of Midgar and its familiar financial lines, its old political furrows, its comforting inclusion of everything grey in a world that attempted black and white. _Everything_ was the end of the world: bright, bright light and the searing ring of frequencies in his ears as WEAPON held him hostage in his own tower and forced him to step onto the scales of justice. Rufus remembered dying. Living was not the same, after that.

* * *

'There are better ways to commit suicide, Rufus,' Reeve told him the day that Rufus woke up, again, and decided that the world was more useful to him functional than apocalyptic. 'You have men that trust you for no good reason and enough remaining from your old company to get up and leave this town.'

* * *

Rufus would leave no town, and do no fleeing. Life, he discovered, could compress itself into a series of images: events could be cruelly minimised to the bare bones of fact. That flipbook of history was what he saw when he refused to blink for death: his birth, a dead woman who must have been his mother, an empty youth, Midgar, Junon, Midgar, Sephiroth, then nothing. Life had used him like a cheap mannequin for one of its greater plays: a cheap inheritance and dealings in the dark that no one would remember. Rufus snarled into the face of an ending that came for him too early.

* * *

'The Turks stay with me because of old transactions made a long time ago in old Midgar,' Rufus told Reeve. If it took effort to sit so casually upright in his wheelchair, Shinra did not let it show. 'Wouldn't you want me to earn that right the way men like yourself do?'

* * *

He had not expected to wake, but since he did, Rufus did what he expected of himself. The first sounds were faint, but every beep from the monitor by his bedside seemed like one klaxon scream following another and another. By the time Rufus counted sixty for his heart, he let his eyes come open, and though they were crusted over with recuperative sleep and sealant, their first glimpse of the new world order was taken with a vengeful, brilliant blue.

'Tseng?' was his first word, because that Turk had been the one best bought, and therefore least likely to have him dead for quid pro quo. Rufus had never enjoyed the shadow of Veld's memory that lingered in their interactions; now equalised, it did not seem so important.

'Sir,' was the reply from his side. Rufus turned to see Tseng seated in a chair, his dress shirt buttoned loosely enough that Rufus could trace the thick path of bandages that wrapped itself around his abdomen and stomach.

'You're alive,' Rufus said.

'So are you,' Tseng replied, blas and as unaffected by any of Rufus' pronouncements as he had ever been. Rufus decided, then, that he might have loved this man, if Tseng could have laughed and if Rufus himself could ever have felt that way about anyone.

He settled instead with saying, without pause, 'We will salvage everything that we can. I will require access to Junon, and then structural plans for Midgar and a final fiscal breakdown of this year.'

There was no immediate reply. With one hand, Tseng hooked a button of his blazer in place so that his injury could not be seen, and then looked up and replied, 'Midgar is in ruins. You have been in that bed for two and a half weeks.'

'How much longer do you think I intend to stay in it?' Rufus asked, reaching gingerly for the bed frame and sitting up. Everything screamed: muscles that had lost mass, the phantom burns that materia could not magic away, his pride. Tseng watched passively. 'We are going to change the world,' Rufus said, breathing hard through his nose. Tseng did not offer him water, painkillers, a hand.

'I have heard this before,' Tseng said with the voice of a man who now had an option to either stay or leave.

'Have you ever wondered,' Rufus posited, 'what you are capable of without materia, without a gun in your hands, without Shinra at your back?'

'Shinra, at this moment, is the sum total of a weak man on a bed.' No more salaries to bind this Turk to the Company; no history of blackmail nor the lure of a privileged lifestyle. Tseng had one foot through the door.

And Rufus smiled, his lips curving into a scimitar's edge. 'What do you think, Tseng, of restorations?'

* * *

Reeve loathed working with Rufus. Partly because of force of popular opinion every time Rufus Shinra walked in through his doors, Reeve was sure that five of his investors walked the other way. But part of it was the product of old experience: Reeve had been a Director long before Rufus Shinra first took his baby steps in politics, and he'd seen every one of Rufus' mistakes from then till now. Reeve didn't think it prejudiced of him to take anything out of the mouth of a man who once used terrorist tactics against his father and blackmailed his men into obedience with more than just a pinch of salt.

When Rufus came through into his office, walking slowly because according to hearsay WEAPON had left him physically more dead than alive, Reeve's first instinct was to pre-empt. 'You're not getting a place on the WRO board, Rufus,' he said.

'I'm afraid I don't recall asking for one, Mr Tuesti.' Rufus had the audacity to look amused, but Reeve believed that the expression was false. The boy Rufus was barely half a century old, for god's sake may not have been the most prudent of planners, but he'd learnt the value of contingencies, and had come into the habit of having more of them than Reeve dared speculate. Perhaps Rufus had walked in hoping to position himself in the Restoration's good books. Reeve supposed he'd never know, now but better to have Rufus work independently than put him in any position of expansion. The best place to keep a Shinra was somewhere backed into a corner.

Reeve tossed his pen onto his desk and resigned himself to not getting work done for a while. 'Then what are you here for?'

'Is this how you treat all your potential investors, Mr Tuesti?' Rufus asked, settling himself into a chair without invitation. Tseng, with an air almost similar to Shinra's, chose to remain standing: visible, silent, potent. Reeve wondered if he should feel privileged, threatened, or both.

'Only the ones who spell trouble,' Reeve said, keeping his eyes on the Turk. He flicked his gaze back to Rufus after a moment. 'You'll excuse me if I tell you that I've never seen you act altruistically in my life, and that my dealings with my investors at this current moment are more philanthropic than profitable.'

He'd said it and in Reeve's sweetest dreams, Rufus Shinra nodded, got up, and left the room.

Rufus Shinra nodded, crossed his legs, and put a proposal on his desk.

Reeve swore that the Turk was smiling.

He took the papers and read them, because it was safer to know what Rufus Shinra wanted you to know than to speculate on what you _thought_ he wanted you to know. The plan was cogent, cohesive, free from most collateral. A good plan, which was everything to be expected of the man. Reeve tried to read between the lines, tried to understand permutations done with Rufus Shinra's own unique calculus. Eventually, he put the proposal down and said, 'This reads like you're treating restoration like a vendetta. Your investment plans sound like cogs in a war machine.'

Rufus smiled. Disturbing how well the expression fit on his pale face, with hair once tinted red and now gone pale with slowly fading sickliness. 'Isn't efficiency a key word, Mr Tuesti?'

'You make this all sound personal,' Reeve said.

'It is personal,' Rufus replied, unperturbed.

'Is nothing you do ever anything less than self-motivated?' Reeve asked.

'Would you trust me if I said my aims weren't?' Rufus returned, and damn the man for hitting the nail on the head. He pushed the advantage, and Reeve felt himself being shoved backwards onto dangerous ground. 'You sorely need what Shinra is offering, Mr Tuesti.' Reeve wasn't sure when he'd so hated the sound of his own name. 'There is very little room for the company to do ill with what we've proposed to you. Consider it an act of good faith. Money is money you need it either way. Perhaps,' Rufus said, standing as he spoke, 'consider the analogy that a flower grown in a refuse pile is no less beautiful than one grown in good soil. Little difference between rotting garbage and compost, after all.'

As Shinra walked off as though he still owned the world, Reeve came to the subtle and somewhat unsettling conclusion that Rufus had, just maybe, said those last words as a plea instead of a threat.

* * *

When Geostigma pushed Rufus back into the wheelchair with less than a tenth of the effort that it'd taken him to get out of it, everyone was afraid for a moment that fury would overtake the erstwhile President. Death was the least of their worries: Rufus Shinra was still, in many ways, a man not yet fully grown. He held grudges like a child, and the ones he couldn't pay back he fought against until he lost. How many years had the Turks watched him play at the game of kings and lose against his own father?

Maybe it was Rufus' reaction to the sickness that convinced Tseng, eventually. Their trust could've been described as tenuous prior to the day that Tseng walked into the newly-constructed lodge at Haelin to find Rufus reading, quiet and composed and turning the pages of the print copy with a hand spotted with dark sickness.

When he heard Tseng enter, Rufus looked up. '_Res dura, et regni novitas me talia cogunt Moliri, et late fines custode tue._'

Tseng didn't bother to ask for a translation. 'Your physiotherapy session starts in five minutes,' he said. Rufus nodded, almost absently, and tucked a bookmark into place. He seemed muted, thoughtful. A more imaginative man would have called Rufus Shinra _penitent_, then. Tseng aided him across into the next room over, and exited quietly afterwards. He returned to turn the book open to Rufus' marked page:

_Harsh necessity, and the newness of my kingdom, force me to do such things and to guard my frontiers everywhere._

The foreign sound in the room was Tseng's quiet laughter.

As though Rufus Shinra could ever be truly penitent.

* * *

The stigma would have been harsher on Rufus if the Planet had not chosen that precise time to present him with a plethora of situations that could've ended the world a second time over. Nothing quite delighted Rufus so much as a _challenge_. When Kadaj and his brothers emerged as it were from the Lifestream, Rufus' response was to laugh and comment that this was the break that they had all been waiting for.

Dying, to Rufus, was a concept seen in relative terms: if the stigma could not cripple him to the point where he could not cripple Kadaj, then Rufus held that he had the better end of the deal. He suffered the indignity, incontinence, vertigo and nausea the same way Tseng suffered torture, interrogation and a few new scars.

Reno and Elena called them both out for it.

'You're crazy,' the redhead informed Rufus as he wrapped knuckles that were freshly bled out from a brutal scuffle in Edge's central plaza. 'Kadaj could break you like a damned twig between his fingers.'

'I don't think he's used to twigs fighting back,' was Rufus' reply, and underneath the drape of his shift his fingers curled, gentle and privately smug, over the edge of a sealed black box.

* * *

After the rains came, the world stopped inverting for a while. Old, friendly forces came back into contention: economics. Unemployment. Infrastructure. Finance. Rufus eased back into his favoured mode of operation like a man thirsting for convalescence. Twelve hour days which he would wrap up with the last of old brandy, calm and rested instead of frenetic and tired as Edge returned to worrying about the real world instead of old nightmares.

They scheduled almost every moment of his life for him: Rufus couldn't go anywhere without becoming an instant target people hated him as much as they needed him. There was always a Turk at his shoulder, whether as shadow or threat. They followed him into meetings, rallies, his office, and sometimes into his bedroom. Privacy became an alien concept.

But, as it were, even in the aftermath of everything, few men would tell Rufus Shinra what to do with his life.

'Elena,' Tseng said into his PHS, 'call Reno and Rude off. I've found him.' Snapping the phone shut, he slipped the device into his pocket and leaned against a broad wall-to-ceiling mirror and watched as Rufus Shinra stood and had himself tailored.

The blond was looking at his own reflection when he said, 'I suppose the game is up.'

'You only had Elena in histrionics,' Tseng nodded, tracing the tailor's movements and evaluating whether there was any risk at hand.

'What do you think?' Rufus asked as he shrugged into the blazer that was offered to him. Tseng walked over as Rufus straightened the fall of his shirt, and the President allowed him to adjust the edge of his cuffs and thread the links through.

'It doesn't fit you,' Tseng said mildly, brushing off Rufus' back and smoothing down the vent of the new suit. There were differences in Rufus' cut and his own, even if the black was the same, and the effect equally crisp. Rufus' suit curved inwards and traced skin and muscle where a Turk would've kept some free looseness to give leanness room to stretch.

'Go,' Rufus said to the tailor, and the man left discreetly. Once they had the room to themselves, he turned and faced Tseng. 'I don't feel any discomfort.'

'You wear it as though you'd walk into a boardroom with it,' Tseng says, a curve to his mouth. He taps Rufus' shoulders. 'The suit tapers to fit you. Impresses rather than flatters.'

Rufus let his hands fall to his pockets. He'd never worn clothing so close to his skin before: during the stigma even linen and cotton had chafed at dermis and caused rashes and pustules to form. The visceral memory demanded reparation; so Rufus'd come and asked his man to give him something fitting, and when he'd caught sight of a suit amongst the display cases he'd felt tempted and quietly thrilled. 'They're not my colours,' Rufus agreed.

'It's not your uniform,' Tseng corrected. Turks wore the suit to blend in. Rufus always needed to obtrude, expand, fill in the spaces with his charisma if not his presence. 'Turn,' Tseng said.

Rufus turned. Tseng's fingers were adroit as he tugged Rufus' tie out of his blazer, and faster still as he undid the knot, pulling and running the silk off of Rufus' neck. Tseng draped it over a nearby rack and moved to unbutton Rufus' collar. 'You do better this way,' he said.

Rufus chuckled, the sound warm in the pits of his stomach. He rang the bell to call for the tailor, and when the man re-entered, Rufus said, 'I'll take this, in light grey.'

The tailor nodded. 'And the tie, sir?' he inquired.

'That too,' Rufus said, shooting a private look at Tseng. 'But leave it in the black.' 


	3. II

They followed him, like how lost city orphans followed any beacon, any sign.

Reno trailed him all the way down to the range the night before he was due to leave, hunching up against the triple-locked cabinets that served to hold the last of their basic weaponry stock. Tseng let him stay there all through his hour long cycle through blanks; each one of the paper men ending easily punctured - if only real people were so easy to convince, and if only words had that much impact.

'The president's on after crazy ideals again,' Reno said, finally, laziness cloaking his intonation. 'Edge I can understand him trying to "rule through charity", or something, but Wutai?' There was an exhalation. Tseng looked back in time to see Reno wave the smoke from his cigarette out of his face. 'Wutai's crazyland, Tseng. They never liked us before, they hate our guts out now, and they've got more than just crappy reactor statistics to prove how evil we are.'

'Yes,' Tseng agreed. 'An entire Planetary uprising does leave a bit of a black mark on Shinra's name.'

Reno snorted, grinding the stub of his smoke out with the heel of his foot. 'You're so cool. Everyone thinks Rude's a rock, but you're ice. You just gonna walk in there? Ask them to stop with their shit and get in line? The old man did it, sure. With an _army_.'

Tseng smiled. He wouldn't tell Reno that he found the concern touching, because it wasn't how they worked - but he smiled. Reno shot him a long, long look at that; part exasperation, part admiration, part the fear of a lonely man scared to lose. 'All Rufus wants to do is advise them, provide them with as much technology as he can and ensure that there's some form of sustainable energy to tide over Edge's industrial ambitions.'

'Meaning,' Reno interpreted, 'he wants them to get in line. Give us the good stuff, and stay on our terms. They'll take that as well as a house on fire.'

'It's an improvement over attempting to convince everyone that his guns are bigger than everyone else's,' Tseng quipped, wiping his firearm clean. He turned it over in his hand, the metal cool and familiar, once and then twice. Then he threw it at Reno. 'Keep that for me,' Tseng said.

'What?' Reno asked, startled, catching the gun reflexively and staring at it like it was a bomb. 'This is yours, boss. What am I supposed to - no, you know what, that's the wrong question. What are _you_ supposed to do without it?'

'The same job that Rufus Shinra does without his father's company,' Tseng shrugged, and walked past Reno out of the door, and up the stairs towards the main Haelin area. It wasn't anywhere near safe for Rufus Shinra to sleep in the city of Edge, even if he worked in it.

Reno walked up behind him, shaking his head. 'Boss. Anyone ever told you you've got a real pair on you?'

Tseng was already shrugging out of his jacket. 'Not in this context, no.' They crossed the small courtyard that separated the operations building from the residential one; those three areas now the sum total of their playground. It was somewhat different from living as a shadow in a city of thousands. Tseng stopped at his door, jacket slung over one arm and his hand on the knob. 'The three of you will do fine,' he said.

Reno's grip on Tseng's gun was harder than it needed to have been. 'Elena's not a rookie anymore,' he agreed. 'And Rude's Rude. But the president's another thing altogether. I don't know what to do with changed men, boss, he keeps trying to do all this suicidal shit.'

'You do the same thing that you've always done,' Tseng said, cracking the door to his room open. 'Keep him from dying. Goodnight, Reno.'

'Goodnight, boss.'

* * *

Elena was there with him in the inventory at six the next morning as he packed to leave. Winter made the mornings grey with cold and dullness, but she stood by him nonetheless as he slid the relevant documents into a solid briefcase. She'd turned up a few minutes after he'd come in. Tseng suspected that she hadn't slept the night before.

Neither of them spoke, beyond the passing, requisite _good morning_.

'The President,' she started, half an hour into their shared silence. 'The President could've hired anyone to do this job.'

'I'm not an engineer, I admit,' Tseng nodded, drumming his fingers on the top of the briefcase. 'Though I've done what reading I can.' Often while holed up with Rufus, the younger man processing data into information, information into knowledge; and all of it with a stunning swiftness that made Tseng believe, for the first time in the wake of a long anticipation, that the President was perhaps also turning knowledge into wisdom.

The last of the data files went in. Tseng snapped the briefcase shut, _click click._

'But you're not the best man for this kind of job,' Elena pointed out, nervous about her own audacity but driven to words by necessity. 'And when does the President settle for anything less?'

'Maybe he's learned something about the value of conserving resources,' Tseng replied, leaving the briefcase where it was and turning to the small cabinets at the side of the inventory room. 'An engineer might be wasted on this mission.' His fingers snapped about a combination lock. One of the cabinet doors swung open neatly.

'Going a bit over packed, aren't you?' Elena murmured as she watched Tseng remove two pieces of materia; mastered, from their look of lustre and sheen.

Tseng slid them into a fitting bracer; it was non-combative, small and snapped neatly into a flat, slim box. He slipped it inside his jacket. 'What else,' he asked her, eyebrows raised, 'were you expecting a man from Shinra to walk into Wutai with?'

She cracked a smile, half-broken and half-true. 'Is one of them a cure, at least?' she asks.

'Should I have brought fire and ice instead?' Tseng parried back. 'That would seem to be Rufus' style, of old.'

She laughed, that time. 'Reparations,' she reminded him.

He put a hand on her shoulder, briefly but there, and said, 'Yes, reparations,' before he moved to leave, without turning back.

* * *

Rude was waiting, with one of their last helicopters, at the front of the lodge. Tseng cocked his head. 'I'm not flying to the station.'

Rude clears his throat, and nods.

'I know you're not. It's always been something of a habit for you to stay close to the ground.' Rufus' voice, from behind. Tseng turns. The President is there, in all his layers. 'But _I_ am, seeing as how I'd rather not be shot while on public transport the way there.'

Tseng chuckled. 'You'll arrive far earlier than I will if you leave now. An exaggerated gesture just to see me off.'

'I'm not leaving now,' Rufus shook his head. 'Just that Rude wanted his own chance at final words.'

'Sir,' Rude said, hands held behind him and shades blocking out his eyes.

'Rude,' Tseng acknowledged, with a tip of his head.

Rude shifted, once onto the back of his heels, then twice, rocking forward and back to stability. 'Have a safe trip.'

Tseng motioned, briefly, at his tie, tied as black around his throat as Rude's, and as good as a salute.

He walked the three miles to the station on the edge of civilisation, and rode the first of Shinra's electric and gas powered trains inwards to Edge, smiling sharply at the irony as he looked on, and beyond.

* * *

Rufus was there in the first-class carriage sleeper that was booked for Tseng, hitting his palm lightly with the stub of his ticket. 'It's impressive,' he said to Tseng as the Turk entered. 'They rebuilt this line from practically nothing, and yet it runs, and more than just adequately.'

Tseng was unperturbed by the fact that Rufus had, by all accounts, seemingly purchased a ticket this expensive to do nothing more than sit in the privacy of the single room to say a few last words. He stowed the briefcase in the overhead, and laid his small bag on the floor. 'Rebuilding an entire city inspires motivation, Rufus.'

'It does, doesn't it,' Rufus said. Tseng sat. Rufus leaned his elbows on his knees. They sat there for a while, close and in close company. 'Are you afraid?' Rufus asked, eventually.

'Afraid?' Tseng echoed, some laughter in his voice. 'No, I'm not afraid.'

Rufus looked up at him. 'That was the wrong question,' the younger man said. 'Are you ashamed?' he asked instead, reaching out with one hand to lay his fingers across Tseng's tie, to feel the stiffness of good silk and to trace, briefly, the man's collar, his pulse, living skin.

Tseng's eyes were dark. 'Yes. I am.'

Rufus tightened his grip, and pulled Tseng in. They kissed rarely, these days; moments saved for need, not excess. When Rufus drew back, his eyes were a fierce blue, and his voice fiercer: 'So am I.'

'Good,' Tseng said, raising his hand to Rufus' face and ghosting his palm over where the man had once been, for a while, blind.

There was a sharp whistle; the last warning before departure. Rufus rose. Tseng could see, from the corner of his eye, Rude waiting on the platform below.

'Come back,' Rufus ordered.

'Maybe if your city heals enough to meet me halfway,' Tseng challenged.

Rufus spared him a victor's smile.

* * *

The train pulled out, and followed the hours through nightfall, headed West.


End file.
